7/21/2009 @ 5:30PM

Ten Minutes That Mattered: Josh James

Josh James dropped out of Brigham Young University in 1996 just as he was starting his senior year. The Web was new and a place he felt his youth and inexperience wouldn’t be a hindrance. He was (and is) confident, thanks to something his mother told him as a child.

When I was in eighth grade I was shorter than every girl in the seventh grade. I came home from school one day and I was crying because some boys were making fun of my “little boots.” When I was a sophomore in high school I weighed 78 pounds and was 5 foot 2.

So my mother early on began telling me, “You can do whatever you want to do.” She also used to tell me, “No one has anything on you.”

You can’t play football when you’re 5 foot 2 and weigh 78 pounds as a sophomore. You just can’t do it. Well, I guess I probably could, but my parents were not going to let me and I wasn’t really that interested in getting slaughtered.

But when you get into the sport of business, you find out, “Oh, I’ve got all the physical requirements here. There are certainly people who are smarter, but I’m definitely in the range. I’m definitely in the range for aggressiveness. I’m definitely in the range for ambition.”

It isn’t arrogance. It’s just a reality that no one’s better than you are. A lot of this is confidence, risk-taking and belief in yourself regardless of what the experts might say.

In 1998 I went to see one of the top venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road and showed him our product. One of his partners said: “There’s never going to be a need for anything other than Web trends.” That was demoralizing. I thought we’d hit it. We were this little company out of Utah finally getting in front of one of these great VCs, and it was a two-minute conversation. I did the demo and they’re like, “Yeah, anyway, thanks for your time. No one’s ever going to need this.”

I think about that a couple times every week. It’s been handy when family members, in-laws in particular, suggested that we weren’t going to be successful and doubted whether I was supporting my wife correctly.

At times, I found myself listening to everyone else. Even though it went against my gut instinct, I would do what everyone else said, then regret it later. There were definitely times in 2000 when people wanted us to not shift our focus, even though I felt like we should go and get into enterprise analytics.

We were targeting small businesses and charging $10 to $20 a month for analytics. A lot of people accused me of shifting around too much. They were like, “You need to focus. You’ve already changed your business twice in the last five years.” And we’re like, “OK. Well, maybe we are stupid. Maybe these people know a lot more than we do. They are a lot older.”

But one thing I’ve had to remind myself of over and over again, back in this theme of what my mom told me If you remember back to high school and think about your graduating class, you were probably one of the smartest people in the class. You were one of the most successful, capable, competent people in the class.

And even though someone may be 20 years older than you, if they were in your class you would have been as smart, capable and competent as they were. They’re not that different from you. They put their pants on one leg at a time.

When you’re a young entrepreneur that’s crucial to remember, because you’ve got older people saying, “Look kid, I’ve been around this block before. You should do X.” That’s important when you’re running a $350 million company and you’ve got a board member who has been involved with a billion dollar company and they say, “You should never sell your product like that. You should never structure your organization like that.”